Archive for March 2014

The tape is searing. There is the voice of an infant screaming as he is wrenched from his mother, who pleads, “There is nothing wrong with my baby. Why are you doing this to us? I would’ve been hung years ago, wouldn’t I? Because [as an Australian Aborigine] you’re guilty before you’re found innocent.” The child’s grandmother demands to know why “the stealing of our kids is happening all over again”. A welfare official says, “I’m gunna take him, mate.”

This happened to an Aboriginal family in outback New South Wales. It is happening across Australia in a scandalous and largely unrecognised abuse of human rights that evokes the infamous Stolen Generation of the last century. Up to the 1970s, thousands of mixed race children were stolen from their mothers by welfare officials. The children were given to institutions as cheap or slave labour; many were abused.

And so it goes. Remember, the government owns these kids, anyway. They can do whatever they want to them with impunity. Just wait till they come for your children. At the moment it’s just the disenfranchised, whether by race, colour or economic circumstance. But if you’re reading this, you and your children are probably still OK. We ignore it happening to the disenfranchised, but the model applies to us, also. It’s why those fighting to establish and protect the rights of disenfranchised, as John Pilger does, are so important in our world. It’s the death of a thousand cuts. And when they come for you and yours, there’s no-one left to defend you, to speak for you.

“But what can I do?”, you ask, and most of you will put it in the too hard basket, hit the DELETE button on this message and move onto to the next item in your Inbox. But not all, because there are some that receive this who ARE doing what you can to make a difference, and I thank you with all of my heart.